Thomas Hardy and the country house: ‘Irregularity is the genius of Gothic architecture’

With the help of specially commissioned drawings by Matthew Rice, Jeremy Musson considers the abiding presence of the stone-built manor house in the stories of Thomas Hardy.

Thomas Hardy knew something about stone. We think of him as one of the giants of English literature, a poet and novelist who was lauded in his lifetime and memorialised alongside Charles Dickens in Westminster Abbey after his death in 1928. His vivid depictions of the lives of farmers and farmworkers such as Tess; of working men, including Jude, the studious stonemason; and his portrayal of provincial West Country town life and its characters, such as the Mayor of Casterbridge, is profound and perceptive. Throughout Hardy’s writing, there is also a notable sense of his interest in buildings, a reflection of his first intended career as an architect.

Above all, Hardy’s imagination was caught by the ancient stone-built manor houses of the Dorset of his youth, houses no longer occupied by old gentry families, but by tenant farmers, friends and neighbours of his parents. They provided models for the fictional Wessex that Hardy created, becoming his scenery, and setting the tone for many of his narratives. Fictional versions include the home of the independently minded Bathsheba Everdene in Far from the Madding Crowd, Hardy’s first bestseller, in 1874, the sales of which allowed him to give up a career in architecture for writing. Another fine old house appears as the home of the miser Benjamin Derriman in The Trumpet-Major (1880) and, most memorably, there is Wellbridge Farm (Fig 4), setting for the ill-fated wedding night in Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891).

Two fictionalised versions of existing manor houses — one based on Stafford House in Dorchester; the other on nearby Athelhampton — appear in his early short story The Waiting Supper. The linked collection of stories in A Group of Noble Dames (1891) calls on, among other buildings, those of Dorset’s Lulworth Castle and Melbury House, Somerset’s Mells Park, Hampshire’s Broadlands and Longleat in Wiltshire. The latter stories stray more consciously into the world of the Big House, something that Hardy sketched with less affection and understanding and less sureness of touch — although he was received at many a grand house when he became famous.

The son and grandson of masons, Hardy was born in Dorset in 1840 and grew up a few miles from Dorchester in Higher Bockhampton. His book-loving mother, Jemima, had formerly been in service with the Fox-Strangways family at Stinsford and provided insights into the world of the country house.

Recommended videos for you

Aged 16, Hardy was apprenticed to local architect John Hicks and, in the 1860s, he moved to London and found work in the office of Arthur Blomfield (later Sir Arthur, vice-president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, RIBA) as a ‘gothic draughtsman’ to ‘restore and design churches and rectory houses’.

In 1867, he returned to Dorset to work for Crickmay of Weymouth; there he met Emma Gifford when working on St Juliot’s church in Cornwall, where her brother-in-law was vicar. They married in 1874.

The kind of houses we encounter in the pages of Hardy are similar to those promoted by William Morris, who founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) in 1877. Such places represented and embodied the lives of the agricultural community and in them, Hardy saw — perhaps more directly than Morris — the contribution of craftsmen, such as his own father and grandfather.

He joined SPAB in 1881 and helped it lobby for better treatment of historic Dorset buildings. His paper Memories of Church Restoration was read at a society meeting in June 1906 and, in one of his reports, he wrote: ‘Irregularity is the genius of Gothic architecture, and it is an act of sacrilege to obliterate an arrangement of the old builders.’

Even after abandoning architecture for writing, Hardy retained an eye for the presence of buildings. His novels describe old, faded manor houses, as well as bridges, mills and village churches, many of them identifiable. The writer and photographer Hermann Lea explored the local countryside and its buildings alongside Hardy and his exhaustive catalogue of places and people was published as Thomas Hardy’s Wessex in 1911.

Hardy spoke of the importance of ‘the human association of ancient buildings’, something he felt was often overlooked. His description of the great barn in Far from the Madding Crowd could easily have been written as something to be read out at a SPAB meeting (and a clear parallel to Morris’s devotion to the barn at Great Coxwell in Oxfordshire): ‘One could say about this barn, what could hardly be said of either the church or the castle, akin to it in age and style, that the purpose which had dictated its original erection was the same with that to which it was still applied. Unlike and superior to either of those two typical remnants of medievalism, the old barn embodied practices which had suffered no mutilation at the hands of time. Here at least the spirit of the ancient builders was at one with the spirit of the modern beholder.’

Hardy’s interest in a building was founded on its connection to people, the way in which it embodied the permanence of ideas, allowing the mind to dwell ‘upon its past history, with a satisfied sense of functional continuity throughout’. He wrote of how a church’s windows, stones and rafters, ‘referred to no exploded fortifying art or worn-out religious creed’, but to the idea that ‘the defence and salvation of the body by daily bread is still a study, a religion, and a desire’.

When the loyal shepherd Gabriel Oak first encounters Bathsheba Everdene’s residence, Weatherbury Farm (modelled on Waterston Manor in Puddle-town), in Far From The Madding Crowd, he appreciates its old connection to the working farm, as the narrator places the history of the former manorial estate as one eaten up by a greater landowner: ‘By daylight, the bower of Oak’s new-found mistress, Bathsheba Everdene, presented itself as a hoary building, of the early stage of Classic Renaissance as regards its architecture, and of a proportion which told at a glance that, as is so frequently the case, it had once been the manorial hall upon a small estate around it, now altogether effaced as a distinct property, and merged in the vast tract of a non-resident landlord, which comprised several such modest demesnes.’

Later, Oak openly disagrees with his rival Sergeant Troy’s description of it as a ‘gloomy house’ (Fig 1). Troy’s notion that ‘sash windows should be put throughout, and these old, wainscoted walls brightened up a bit; or the oak cleared quite away, and the walls papered’ to make the place ‘more modern, that we may be cheerful whilst we can’ would not have gone down well with SPAB.

Hardy’s architectural training will have helped him in some technical descriptions, but it is the quality of weathering that brings forth Hardy’s warmest words: ‘Soft brown mosses, like faded velveteen, formed cushions upon the stone tiling, and tufts of the house-leek or sengreen sprouted from the eaves of the low surrounding buildings.’

Inside, Oak finds a main staircase, ‘of hard oak, the balusters, heavy as bed-posts, being turned and moulded in the quaint fashion of their century, the handrail as stout as a parapet-top, and the stairs themselves continually twisting round like a person trying to look over his shoulder’. Again, there are signs of habitation and long usage: ‘The floors above were found to have a very irregular surface, rising to ridges, sinking into valleys; and being just then uncarpeted, the face of the boards was seen to be eaten into innumerable vermiculations.’ Upstairs, Oak discovers Bathsheba and her servant-companion, whose beauty is compared by the narrator to a figure painted by Gerrit Dou, linking the house’s historic interior to the golden age of Dutch painting (Fig 2).

In contrast, there is a memorable, if unappealing, modern country house in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, the home of Mrs D’Urberville and her son, Alec. With an alien, modern name, The Slopes, and bright new materials (Fig 3), it confounds innocent, hopeful Tess, who expects a venerable old house with an attachment to the land. ‘It was not,’ Hardy writes, ‘a manorial home in the ordinary sense, with fields, and pastures, and a grumbling farmer, out of whom the owner had to squeeze an income for himself and his family by hook or by crook. It was more, far more; a country-house built for enjoyment pure and simple, with not an acre of troublesome land attached to it beyond what was required for residential purposes, and for a little fancy farm kept in hand by the owner, and tended by a bailiff.’

The house rises ‘like a geranium bloom’, as beyond it stretches ‘the soft azure landscape of The Chase — a truly venerable tract of forest land, one of the few remaining woodlands in England of undoubted primaeval date’.

At the other extreme, The Trumpet-Major (1880) has Anne Garland walking through fields to retrieve her mother’s newspaper from a squire-farmer, heading for Oxwell Hall where ‘the grey, weather-worn front of a building edged from behind the trees’ (Fig 6). Modelled on 16th-century Poxwell Manor, south of Dorchester, the house is described as ‘once the seat of a family now extinct, and of late years used as a farmhouse’ by Benjamin Derriman. Rambling and neglected, it has ‘all the romantic excellencies and practical drawbacks which such mildewed places share in common with caves, mountains, wildernesses, glens, and other homes of poesy’. The poesy remains outside, as the interior of the house is so damp that: ‘Mustard and cress could have been raised on the inner plaster of the dewy walls at any height not exceeding three feet from the floor; and mushrooms of the most refined and thin-stemmed kinds grew up through the chinks of the larder paving.’

But perhaps the most memorable house is the one that features on the doomed wedding night of Tess, whose husband Angel Clare has booked lodgings in a place ‘well known to all travellers through the Froom Valley; once a portion of a fine manorial residence (Fig 5), and the property and seat of a d’Urberville, but since its partial demolition a farmhouse’. The knightly family of D’Urberville is the one from which Tess’s agricultural labourer father Durbeyfield claims descent and Clare has booked it half in jest. Set close to an Elizabethan bridge, it has been identified as based on Woolbridge Manor, near Wool.

Clare’s cheerful announcement of ‘Welcome to one of your ancestral mansions’ cannot dispel the depressing effect the ‘mouldy old habitation’ has on his bride, especially after they find two grim, life-size portraits painted on panels built into the wall that ‘represent women of middle age, of a date some two hundred years ago, whose lineaments once seen can never be forgotten. The long, pointed features, narrow eye, and smirk of the one, so suggestive of merciless treachery; the bill-hook nose, large teeth, and bold eye of the other suggesting arrogance to the point of ferocity, haunt the beholder afterwards in his dreams’.

In his writing, Hardy creates a series of stone-built houses that are often partly ageing back into Nature. These buildings are heavy with a sense of human history, longstanding witnesses to the joys and sorrows of country people. It is always a surprise, therefore, to encounter Max Gate, the house he built outside Dorchester in 1883–85 and occupied until his death. Pert and brick-built, loosely Queen Anne in character, its big comfortable rooms evoke the life of the great wordsmith, but remain a world away from the old manor houses that seemed to hold such a fascination for him and which his writing so brilliantly conjured up.

Acknowledgements: Susan Hill